


Running to Stand Still

by atouchofyou



Category: Dragon Age
Genre: Angst, Backstory, Gen, Regret
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-11-11
Updated: 2011-11-11
Packaged: 2017-10-25 22:38:21
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,360
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/275606
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/atouchofyou/pseuds/atouchofyou
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Anders has spent his entire life running.<br/>---<br/>Act Three, just before "Justice" quest, Female Hawke but vague as to rogue/warrior</p>
            </blockquote>





	Running to Stand Still

He's running again. He tried to delude himself into thinking that it's different this time, that now, he is turning and taking a stand, facing for the first time what has always hounded him. It doesn't work. If Justice has done one thing, has changed nothing else about him, he has removed the astounding skill Anders possessed at lying. To everyone, really, but most of all to himself. This is not taking a stand. This is running.

\---

Hawke has visited Bethany again. He can tell in the way she walks: carefully even strides, never stretching her legs out to their entirety; and in how her shoulders ride up, bunched against her neck. When she asks him if he'd like to go for a hike by the Wounded Coast, her voice high and cheerful, he's sure of it. Hawke always seeks out wide open spaces after being in the Gallows. Anders has never been inside past the basement levels to smuggle out fleeing mages, but he remembers the Circle in Fereldon. The dank walls wound around and around him, constricting his body until he thought his mind would snap if he could not see the horizon, if he could not leave the spirals and loops of a dozen floors, each smaller than the last. When he dreamt, he sought out wide flat places in the Fade, desperate to throw his arms out and not touch dank stone. The demons would come then, slithering promises of power into his ears: bloody Templar armor amidst the ruins of the tower and himself walking far away. Every time they came, he ran the next day. He was fleeing the demons as much as the confinement. It was easier to resist when he already had some of what they promised. He wondered sometimes if Uldred hadn't been mad so much as the man simply wanted to see the horizon again.  


When they reach the coast, Hawke find a cliff jutting out into the ocean, closes her eyes and simply breathes. She doesn't move. He watches her, but the tension never leaves her shoulders. It unnerves him. Hawke is fidgety, always using two motions when one would do, constantly glancing around her, dancing from foot to foot, picking at things, tracing patterns with her fingers—Hawke moves, except when she is here. He wonders why she tortures herself with all the air Bethany cannot breathe and all the space she cannot occupy. He wonders why she stares at the horizon Bethany is no longer allowed to see. She stares out over the water without seeing it. She is still in the Gallows and she will not allow herself to leave just because her body is on the coast.  


He knows she asks him to come with her because she can count on him to heal her should bandits or worse spring from the nooks and crannies. He would stop her if she thought of doing anything stupid with a knife or a leap. She never asks anyone else to come, and he wonders if this is not meant to be a plea for him to heal her of this, too. No one else sees her broken like this, and he doesn't know if this should be taken as a compliment. Perhaps she thinks him so broken himself that he misses the fractures in her facade. If this is a plea, if he knew how to heal her, he would. Andraste, he would heal everyone's fractures if he knew how. Maybe he was meant to learn it, but he had run away again the day Wynne covered How To Save The World in class.

\---

He had never been much of an Andrastian; most of his religious knowledge came from experimenting to see which combination of crude words coupled with the prophet's name would make the Templars most indignant. The casual cruelties the priests turned a blind eye to in the Circle over the years had served to keep him away when he might otherwise have sought comfort in the dark, incense-filled rooms, repetitions of the Chant tugging at the edge of hearing. Hawke, living with mages all her life, had expressed similar feelings toward the Chantry. And so when he saw her climbing the steps with heavy footfalls, he had followed her, Justice articulating his disapproval with every step.  
She went to Sebastian, full of doubts and questions, her voice low with despair. He's thought Sebastian would give her the same trite words of forgiveness, acceptance and trusting the absent Maker lifted directly from the Chant, but the other man had listened intently before offering Hawke genuine words of comfort. The simple sentences were spoken from a place of compassion and empathy. He knew her struggles, for they were also his, and the Maker had not seen fit to grace him a way to end the guilt for sins he wasn't sure were actually his. He told her faith was not an answer, the the Chantry could not give her the absolution she sought. Faith, he said, could only heal—not remove scars.  


Anders hated Sebastian in that moment. He wanted this task to be easier, had wanted proof that the Chantry did not truly care about the plights of others. He wanted to believe that his actions were justified. Instead, things were only more muddle. Justice swept aside such concerns with a wave of his incorporeal hand.  


 _We are Justice. We are always justified. Sacrifices must be made._   


Once, he would have argued. Where was justice for those who would die? How many shades of gray would the spirit overlook? These days it was easier to turn his thoughts in another direction and run away again.

\---

After nearly an hour of staring over the waves, Hawke turned to him and motioned back to Kirkwall. He kept pace beside her for several minutes when she finally spoke.  


“When did you know you were a mage?” Of course her mind would still be with Bethany.  


“When I was around eight years old. Early, but not by much.”  


“Bethany was only nine, still wore her hair in pigtails. Carver was being a tit like usual, pulling her braids and teasing her because it was winter and we had to stay inside and he was always so antsy. Bethany yelled at him to stop, but he made a face and yanked one really hard. All of a sudden, he had little ice crystals everywhere: his hair, the corners of his eyes, on his hands. He couldn't move his legs and he started screaming at her to undo it, to let him go, and she just burst into tears. Mother put her face in her hands and her shoulders started shaking and I knew she was crying, too. Father released Carver, who stomped off to Maker-knows-where, and Bethany ran into Father's arms. I just stood there watching them all and I knew that nothing was ever going to be the same again.” She recited the story without inflection, gazing off into the middle distance. Anders sighed.  


“It's not usually a happy moment when a child discovers his magic for the first time. I was alone, climbing one of the very few good climbing trees and I fell out. I landed on my arm, and that snap is something I'll never forget. I was terrified. There was a healer in the village, but she was one of the kind who causes more pain than she relieves. I would have done anything to avoid her, so I sat there cradling my arm to my chest, crying and begging my arm not to really be broken. I started willing it to be whole, and then it tingled and itched and I was suddenly very tired—but my arm wasn't broken anymore.”  


Hawke frowned. “Does it always show up with pain or anger? Merrill told me she accidentally set an aravel on fire as a child because she couldn't get the awning to fold up properly and it frustrated her.”  


“It takes a lot of energy to cast, especially with new spells. It's why we practice: not just for control, but for it to get easier. The first spell a mage ever casts is the hardest. You have focus a lot of energy, and children don't usually do that with happiness. It does happen, though. I knew a girl whose first spell came with her first kiss. The boy, however, ran away screaming.”  


“Off to call a Templar, no doubt.” Anders nodded.  


“How long did it take for the Templars to find you?”  


“Two years. I lived so far in the mountains that no one had seen a mage in decades, and I didn't know what magic even was. I thought the Maker had answered my prayer, not that I had used magic. Eventually, I figured out that whenever I was “praying” I was actually casting a healing spell. It wasn't frightening at all, the way I thought it would be. I thought it was a gift. I was healing people, not hurting them! I experimented with healing animals. Chickens, mostly. We had problems with foxes and I was able to save them more often than not, so we had a lot of eggs to trade with.”  


He paused to look at her from the corner of his, to see if she would mock him for having been a mountain brat raising chickens. But her gaze had turned inwards and he cursed himself for remembering too late that she had done the same in Lothering. Presumably, Bethany had helped her.  


“Once, I dared to try to heal my mother's arthritis. It didn't work, and she woke up and wanted to know what I was doing holding her hand in the dark. In the end, my cat did me in. Poor Ser Stripy He really didn't deserve his fate.”  


“Ser Stripy?” Hawke would mock him for that.  


“I was _five_ when I named him. He was a tabby and I did not have a large imagination as a child. I raised him from a half-starving mangy kitten. When the foxes got tired of the chickens, they went after him. He'd managed to fight them off and limp onto our door stoop. I was horrified and started healing him immediately. When I was done, I looked up to see our neighbor staring at me with fear and revulsion.”  


He can feel Justice stirring. He knows this story as intimately as Anders does now, has lived it over and over again in his memories and it still retains the power to make him prepare to jump to the forefront and wage war. Once, Anders had thought this was a good thing.  


“They threw me in a cellar for nearly two weeks until they bothered to alert the templar in the next town of their deadly malificar. I bolted the second they opened the door, my first escape. I didn't make it far. Ser Stripy lay a few feet from the threshold, his neck snapped. The villagers had murdered him and left his body to rot.  


“I don't know what the Templar expected to see when he ran around the corner after me, but I doubt it was a half-starved dirty child crying over a rotting cat. He must have felt sorry for me because he tried to tell me that the Maker cared for cats as well as people and that Stripy was now at His side. He let me say good-bye to my mother and to keep the sack of belongings she gave me. It's more common for Templar to simply rip the child away and confiscate anything personal.”  


“So he was a nice Templar, then.” Hawke chewed at her lip.  


“Oh, yes, so nice he bound my hands for the entire trip so I couldn't cast my deadly healing spells. The blisters on my wrists were oozing blood by the time we got there and I could barely stand from the fever the infection gave me.” Hawke glanced at his wrists and away again, her jaw clenched. The image of Bethany being bound and led away in much the same manner sprang to mind.  


They passed the rest of the return journey in silence. At the entrance to the Hanged Man, Anders turned to her and placed a hand on her shoulder. He wanted to say something, but couldn't find the words for the regret and guilt and sorrow he felt. She gazed back at him, her eyes flat and unblinking. After a moment, he simply turned and open the door.  
Varric took one look at them and the laughter he normally wore melted away to weariness. He motioned Hawke in. Anders gave the dwarf his regards, then made his excuses to melt away into Darktown again. He felt a twinge of jealousy for the way Hawke would confide in him in a way she never does with Anders. But then, Varric is man of words in a way that Anders is not. He notices things and Anders knows he will be hard-pressed to keep his new plan of escape secret. He tries to comfort himself with the thought that Hawke's shoulders had less tension, at least. He'd played his part in the ritual she'd developed after every trip to Bethany. First, the Wounded Coast. Now she'll get staggeringly drunk with Varric, who will see her safely home and tip off Aveline. Tomorrow, she and Fenris will show up at the manor and the three of them will see about something or other involving swords and intimidation and lots of brute force. Then Isabela will charm her into joining her in something exhilarating and almost certainly illegal for a beautiful rush of adrenaline. Merrill's for tea and a smile, the Chantry for Sebastian to remind her that not everyone against freeing the mages is insane, Maker damn him. She'll return to his clinic in a few days, sarcastic and witty and dragging him along on some wild nug chase again and they'll all be relieved. In the meantime, he'll plan how to lie to her. He'll plan how to run for the horizon one last time.


End file.
